In recent years, digital broadcasting involving digitizing and broadcasting video and audio signals has been put into practice and a full transition from terrestrial analog broadcasting to digital broadcasting is impending in the near future. In digital broadcasting, video signals and audio signals are multiplexed and, after scrambling, as the occasion demands, in order to enable viewing only by specific viewers, turned into a transport stream. The transport involves partitioning into fixed length packets (transport stream packets: TS packets) and transmission. A digital broadcast receiver receives and demodulates digital broadcast data, generates TS packets, performs filtering to extract the TS packets of the channel selected by the viewer, and outputs them upon descrambling, if necessary.
FIG. 10 illustrates the format of a TS packet according to the MPEG2−TS (Moving Picture Experts Group 2 Transport Stream) standard widely used in digital broadcasting. As shown in FIG. 10, a TS packet is made up of a 4-byte (32-bit) TS packet header and a 184-byte payload. The TS packet header contains various control information pertaining to the TS packet. The payload, which is an area used for the storage of user data, has a PES packet, which contains image and audio, section data, which contains various types of service information, etc., and an adaptation field, which contains time information, etc.
The TS packet header includes a transport error indicator. The transport error indicator is a 1-bit flag. During the demodulation of the digital broadcast data and generation of TS packets in the digital broadcast receiver, it is set to “1” if it is found that there is an uncorrectable bit error of at least one bit in the TS packet. Namely, in the subsequent processing by the digital broadcast receiver, it is understood that the packet contains an uncorrectable bit error if the transport error indicator of the TS packet header is set to “1”.
When the transport error indicators of the TS packets are checked and errors are detected in a conventional digital broadcast receiver, in some digital broadcast receiver, the TS packets may be discarded on the assumption that these TS packets cannot be used (e.g., see Patent document 1).
Moreover, in order to minimize the occurrence of freeze-ups when TS packet dropouts and errors occur in a digital broadcast receiver installed in a mobile unit experiencing unstable radio reception, such as an in-vehicle TV, in the past, it has been proposed (e.g., see Patent document 2) to interpolate transmitted MPEG4 video using a single segment instead of the missed packets or erroneous packets.    Patent document 1: JP 2000-156705A    Patent document 2: JP 2005-260606A